Injured Workers’ Jobs Protected, State Justices Say

Workers who are fired after suffering injuries on the job can sue their employers for disability discrimination, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The decision overturns 16 years of lower-court rulings and clears the way for thousands of injured workers to collect potentially large damage awards when they are fired after being injured on the job and refused reasonable accommodations to continue working.

“Employers immediately are going to have to pay more attention to how they treat workers’ compensation claims in general,” said Brad Seligman, an attorney for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. “And they are going to have to be much more careful about taking actions that can be perceived as retaliatory.”

Companies will “have to be careful about how they treat anyone who has been injured on the job,” added William Quackenbush, an employment law expert who filed a brief in the case on behalf of employees. “They are not going to be able to tell that person, ‘We are sorry. We couldn’t wait for you to return. We filled the job.’ ”

Employer groups have argued that state law limits injured workers to collecting only the restricted amounts allowed under workers’ compensation law if they are fired. Lower courts have generally agreed.

But the Supreme Court, in a ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, substantially expanded the potential liability employers face in such cases. “Disability discrimination is indistinguishable in many ways from race and sex discrimination,” Chin wrote for the court.

If a disability affects a worker’s ability to perform a job, the employer may still treat that worker differently from other employees, the court said. But the company must provide reasonable accommodations for the worker’s disability. If such accommodations would make it possible for the employee to perform the job effectively and the company fires the worker anyway, then that “discrimination based on disability, like sex and age discrimination, violates a substantial and fundamental public policy,” Chin wrote.

The case could be particularly important for higher-paid workers because those with higher earnings tend to win larger jury awards for emotional distress and punitive damages, which are designed to deter future corporate misbehavior, Seligman said.

Before the Supreme Court decision, workers who were fired after being injured at work could obtain a maximum of $10,000 in damages, plus their lost earnings and $250 for legal costs and expenses under state workers’ compensation law, he said. Plaintiff lawyers often declined to accept such cases.

The case before the high court was brought by Theresa Dillon, who worked for four years as an administrative secretary for the Ventura County city of Moorpark. Dillon said she suffered a knee injury at work and filed a claim for workers’ compensation benefits.

After she recuperated from knee surgery and tried to return to work in 1994, city officials informed her she had been fired because she could no longer kneel, squat or climb many stairs, she said. She insisted that she could do her secretarial job if she were allowed to use a wheelchair ramp rather than the stairs. But the city refused to rehire the woman, then 36.

“It was pretty blatant [discrimination] as far as I was concerned,” said Maury Mills Jr., her lawyer.

Dillon won at the trial court and in a Court of Appeal, but the Supreme Court agreed to review the case because of conflicting rulings in such disputes.

Mills said Dillon has since found another job in a doctor’s office, although she still suffers from problems with her knee. With Monday’s ruling, she can now pursue her discrimination claims in trial court.

The city of Moorpark plans to dispute Dillon’s charges and expects to prevail, said Harold A. Bridges, who is representing the city.

He complained that Monday’s decision “has expressly changed the rules after 16 years of jurisprudence.” Employers now will be forced to defend terminations both before a workers’ compensation board and in civil court, he said.

The ruling “expands the exposure employers have when they discharge an employee,” Bridges said.

Seligman agreed, contending that workers frequently complain they were fired after filing workers’ compensation claims. “In the past, there has been virtually no sanction,” he said. “Now there is very serious potential liability.”

Even before the current ruling, workers could file a discrimination suit under federal law. But the federal rules and remedies are less beneficial to plaintiffs than those under state law, Seligman said.

Complaints about being terminated after a workplace injury have been among the most common claims in the work force, Quackenbush said, because “employers have known they could get away with this.”

Monday’s ruling “opens the door to this large group of employees, and believe me it is large, who are treated rotten simply because they were injured on the job,” he said.

Seligman said the ruling was so broad that it gave any employee the right to sue for being fired after filing a workers’ compensation claim. But Quackenbush said workers in such cases will still have to show a lingering disability.